The Prince,
As The King
His Father
Lies Dying
This medium, the Internet, enables an unprecedented synthesis of literature, art and music which can be self-published at little or no expense in a truly global agora.
The nearest equivalents, until now, has been the children's "talking book" (with digital sound chips), and the wonderful record albums, from the glory days of rock'n'roll, which came with pages of pictures and text (like the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour"), but these are cumbersome, expensive and static.
In cyberspace there are no inky presses, no stinky darkrooms, no "vinyl is final" -- the fluid nature of this electronic medium allows for the indefinite evolution, revision, growth and development of any piece of work. It has the further advantage of universal accessibility, and requires no corporate publisher, no gallery, no distributor -- in short, no patronage. This is tremendously liberating.
Furthermore, the reader/viewer/listener can respond to the artist with the mere click of a mouse and a few taps on a keyboard.
Of the five or six human senses, at least three (touch, smell and intuition having yet to be clearly digitized) are immediately accessible on the Web. Within this medium, an interplay of media (textual, visual and aural) offers the multi-disciplined artist the opportunity to explore the interplay of words, sights and sounds in a manner never before possible.
A Ghost Among The Ghosts is a collection of illustrated scored short stories. The text has been converted to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The illustrations, created in various media, and the original music have been digitized and incorporated with the text into this web site.
In this collection, there are stories inspired by pictures, pictures inspired by stories, and songs inspired by both, with revisions all around inspired by insights triggered by the multisensory juxtapositions thus engendered.
All right, I exaggerate a bit. What I've just described is the ideal of what is to come. The technology is still evolving, and the huge size of sound files, coupled with slow download times, has limited the music in the collection to snippets, little more than a lick and a promise.
Nor are my skills as equally balanced as what I've just described. I am a "words guy." Even when I played in bands for 25 years, I was always the lyricist, the singer with a headful of verbalized ideas, the poet who seized an instrument mostly just to frame and deliver his poems. Thus, the thrust of this particular example of pictures/words/music synthesis is to use graphics and sound to enhance my stories. For other artists, the visual or the aural, rather than the textual, may be the wellspring.
This new medium is not without problems and challenges. For one thing, each web site looks different on every different browser and monitor, which is maddening to some web designers (although I find it part of its charm). My pet peeve is that most web designers work on huge monitors, with fast download times, and seem to assume that their entire audience is similarly blessed. The great majority of web surfers, however, are using smaller monitors (sometimes VERY small monitors on laptop computers), with slow telephone-modem download times, and spend agonizing minutes waiting to see web pages that then require them to scroll not only up and down, but from side to side as well. I, for one, do not expect my audience to consist solely of rich people with fancy equipment, and I am commited to producing clean uncluttered pages with small files. Bombast and frills do not make for beauty or functionality.
There is another problem: with such an ephemeral product, how can an artist make a living? Many web publishers have tried to deal with this problem by selling advertising space, but ads are annoying and contrary to art. As an experiment, I am asking my readers to each, if they like my work, simply mail me a dollar. If word of mouth (word of email?) results in a great enough readership, then even a small percentage of contributing enthusiasts could more than cover my modest expenses.
And those expenses are indeed modest. A computer is required, of course, and some software. I have used Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop for graphics (although the very inexpensive Adobe PhotoDeluxe would have sufficed for most of it), GifBuilder for animations, SoundEdit 16 for music, and Fetch to upload files to this site. The code was written in raw HTML, using only SimpleText. This is all available in any good school's computer lab.
The tales in this collection range from the struggles of the young and speechless to the life-reviewing dream of an old man encountering his young self on a Haight-Ashbury park bench, set in a simple but, I hope, elegant web design.
-- Bobby Bradford
Music from "Idol" by Jennifer Bessette, performed by Jennifer Bessette, produced by Bobby Bradford